“I’m New To DJing, Is It OK To Use Sync?”

On our podcast recently, one of our students, Sam, asked about the sync button in DJing. He said: “Please help me to understand something. I started DJing in later life, now aged 52. I love the technology. I rip samples, I use stems, I loop on three decks, and so on.

“In the last few years, I’ve been playing larger parties and also on CDJ setups. The way I utilise all the above is to make my own prerecorded edits for such parties. The thing I don’t understand though, is that to many fellow DJs, all those efforts go unnoticed, and all they are worried about is whether I use the sync button or not.

“Why on earth wouldn’t anyone use the sync button? And more so, why on earth would anyone care whether someone else is using a sync button or not? Seems so silly.”

To sync, or not to sync?

Firstly, thanks to Sam for the question.

This is an age-old debate, and there’s so many ways of coming at this, so I’m not going to regurgitate all the old arguments here. Poor Sam would probably be bemused to know how long this has been going on for, bearing in mind he’s a relatively newcomer to this game.

So I’m going to just share three points here that I think illustrate where we’re at today with all of this.

Sync (or not) is NOT what DJing is about

When other DJs are saying, “Are you using the sync button or not?”, this shows a lack of understanding about what DJing is.

It comes from DJs not realising that it’s not about the technical things you’re doing, but it’s about whether you’re conveying emotion to the dancefloor, whether you are showing your energy and your passion and your love of music. If you are, you’re all very likely to have an incredible night.

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We have a very easy way of putting this here at the school: DJing is about playing the right music for the people in front of you right now.

And more than ever, in today’s world, how you do that really doesn’t matter.

It’s all about the emotion, baby…

But here’s an important second point. If what you ARE doing isn’t making that emotional connection with the dancefloor, if it isn’t thrilling them, if they’re not thinking, “oh wow, there’s a slightly different edit that’s got some different bits!” and so on, then really, that in itself is also something to think about.

In other words, just as whether or not you use sync doesn’t really matter, equally, how much time you’ve put into preparing special edits and so on also doesn’t matter, if the dancefloor ultimately doesn’t care. Us DJs always need to watch our audiences carefully and be honest about that to ourselves, because if that isn’t hitting home with our audiences, then why are we doing it?

So I think Sam is right to think it’s a bit silly that other DJs stand there watching what buttons he is pressing, but at the same time, he should also focus on doing the things that have the biggest impact on his audiences, and that most effectively convey what he wants to say to them, because trying to impress other DJs with re-edits and so on could also be misguided.

And anyway, you shouldn’t play to other DJs…

The third point I want to raise here is an absolute classic: Other DJs are never your audience. The dancefloor is your audience. So frankly, you shouldn’t care what other DJs are saying.

You’ve got no idea how good those DJs are. All you’ve got is them saying, “I’m a DJ too, why are you pressing that sync button?”

And the chances are very high that the real motivation behind their interest in you is that they want to be DJing instead of you! Your job as a DJ is to focus on that dancefloor and to ignore anyone who’s trying to poke holes in your technique or whatever.

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Listen to the episode

Finally…

Our position here at the Digital DJ Tips school has always been pretty clear: You’d be crazy not to use the sync button if it’s in front of you, if it helps you in what you’re trying to do, and if you know what you’d do if for some reason it stopped working.

The very best DJs in the world, at least, some of them are very happy to do that and you should be as well.